


Like ghosts in the snow

by Cursed_Me



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alternative Universe - War, Angst, Government Conspiracy, It's all very sad really, Kinda, M/M, World War III, all hail the glow cloud, captain america inspired, captain america!frank iero, look away, secret message in the tags: you are never coming home, sing the last tag in patrick neil harris voice, sorry - Freeform, there's no happy ending here, winter soldier!gerard way
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-03
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:13:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 20,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24522910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cursed_Me/pseuds/Cursed_Me
Summary: Frank was 20, when the war began and everything went to shit. His whole life went up in flames, and now they're trying to tell him it wasn't even real. His life, not the war. The war was real. Or maybe it's the other way around... at this point he doesn't even know what they're trying to convince him of, but it doesn't matter, because it was real. Gerard was real.
Relationships: Frank Iero/Gerard Way
Comments: 6
Kudos: 10





	1. .

**Author's Note:**

> Hi folks, Matt here. So this is actually a rewriting of The Ghost of You, which I published a few months ago and have now taken down.  
> It's sort of a Captain America cross over, I guess? Well it's at least heavily inspired by the first avenger storyline, except it's set in WW3 instead of 2. Steve Rogers makes a special guest apparition at some point.  
> English is not my native language so if you notice anything from typos to actual mistakes or if you have tips on how to improve my writing, please let me know: all help is welcome.  
> I hope that you enjoy the first chapter and that you have a nice day (or night if it's night) :)

Episode I

_Sing a song for California_

There are a lot of problems with me telling this story.

First of all, and probably the smallest one: I am a terrible storyteller.

I mean, there was a time of my life in which I was an American literature major, and I love reading so much that I have the word _bookworm_ tattooed across my knuckles, but that doesn’t mean I have any idea of how the fuck to tell a story. And I guess you could say that this is a big fucking problem already, because I’m getting myself into something I have no idea of how to deal with.

How do I structure a story? Which tense do I use? Past? Present? Both?

I have no idea of what I am doing, and I haven’t even started yet. Which apparently is a constant in my life and if not the source of all my problems, at least of a good chunk of them.

Second, and strictly linked with the first one: I don’t know how I want, or should, tell this story. And this helps proving the fact that I don’t know what the hell I'm doing and that I should probably just fuck off and let it go.

Third: I really _shouldn’t_ be telling this story.

Like, theoretically I am not even legally allowed to: it's supposed to be classified. Which basically is why I am trying to put in use my very shitty story telling abilities to try and tell it: if I don’t, nobody else will.

Not that it matters. It’s not like anyone is here to listen to it, and even if anyone were, it’s not like they would care. Not that they _should_ care: it's anything but important, and it's not any kind of big revelation. Anyone with a brain should already know everything I am about to say… if it’s real, which they keep telling me it’s not. But I know it’s real. Maybe the story doesn’t really need to be told as much as I need to tell it.

Fourth, and possibly the biggest one: I'm not good at telling stories, but I'm pretty sure this is literally the worst possible way to start one.

So, allow me to try again, and this time let’s start with the basics.

My name is Frank. I’m not sure of how old I am, but I guess I should look arond 25 by now, and I’ve been sober for ages. And I’ve been sober for ages because I’m locked away in some Government facility.

Or, at least, I assume I am in some Government facility: there are no windows, the light is always on and the walls are white and padded, and that’s about it. If I lay down and stay very still, I can hear a muffled sound of water dripping, sure and rhythmic like a very small, very insistent hammer, somewhere below me, but there’s not really much more to report.

I guess they’re trying to torture me. Sensory deprivation, or something like that. Maybe it’s working, considering that I am talking to myself, and pretending to tell the story of my life to someone that isn’t anywhere but in my head. And that the story of my life is allegedly just a delusion, completely made up by my sick mind.

I guess I am going insane. Maybe there’s mercury in the shit they’re feeding me with, and I’ll end up as mad as a hatter… or maybe they’re right, and this is not a government facility but an asylum, and I am already insane, and I made it all up and nothing is real… but who cares, right? It’s not like it’s going to be a problem, as long as I stay in here, and it doesn’t look like I am going anywhere anytime soon.

 _Here_ is a cell, or something like that, by the way.

It’s small: roughly five steps for four, and I am pretty small myself, so my steps are kinda short. I don’t know how tall the ceiling is, because everything is white and making things out is a bit difficult, but I’d guess something like 9 feet tall.

There’s not much with me in this hole: a cot pushed against one of the long walls with a gray, rough blanket on it, a toilet and then a bottle of water that tastes like mud.

They bring me food, too, every now and then, but it’s too irregular to use it to keep track of time, so I have no idea of how long I’ve been down here: all I know is that they keep me constantly about an inch away from starving to death. With my enhanced metabolism I should basically be always eating: a snack every two hours or so instead than three meals a day. Ever since I’ve been here, it’s been more like a snack or two every day, at random times.

And that’s about it.

All my little world.

Little Frankie in the little box.

Now, you’re probably wondering how the hell I ended up in this shithole… and that brings us back to the beginning, when I said I wanted to tell a story, so sit your asses down and get comfy, I guess.

It all started in January 2021… and if I’m right and all of this is real (and it is) and you’ve ever opened an history book, even just once in your life, I don’t need to tell you what happened in January 2021.

For the life of me, I cannot remember the exact date of the day, but I do remember the rest so well that it almost hurts, and I remember that it was a Sunday, and that Gerard and I were watching cartoons.

It was late morning, about 11 am, and we had just got up: Gerard was still in his skeleton onesies, cuddled up with a purple knitted blanked on the only armchair stuffed in the tv corner of our piece of shit flat in Brooklyn, and I was sitting cross legged on the floor right next to his legs with a bowl of soggy corn flakes with way too much almond milk and way too little corn flakes in it.

An old ass episode of Adventure Time was on, the one about Gunther being a god of destruction, I think, and we were bickering about what to get for dinner. Sundays were take-out days.

Everything felt stupidly normal.

There was a chipped plate with a chocolate stain on the coffee table in front of me, abandoned there after a midnight snack, and there were comics and books scattered everywhere, and I could see at the very least five of Gerard’s sketchbooks tugged wherever they could simultaneously fit and be handy to reach in case he got inspired, and there was a very old and very ratty Smashing Pumpkins tee laying on the floor by the bedroom door, and I could not for the life of me figure out what the fuck it was doing there.

The sun was shining outside, and the light came in blades from the gaps in the curtains, and you could see the particles of dust dancing in them, if you watched closely. If you looked up, instead, peaking through the fabric you could see the tiniest slice of the bluest winter sky New York had to offer.

Outside, nine floors below us, messy piles of grayish snow were melting on the sidewalks, while the mass of poor bastards who still insisted on paining themselves with having and using a car in New York honked and swore viciously at the traffic.

Just a regular Sunday morning in New York, the city that never slept.

If someone had told me that just minutes later shit would have hit the fan, I probably would have not believed them.

To be honest, it seemed so unlikely that anything could happen in a morning like that, that when, minutes later, shit _did_ hit the fan, I did not realize it. That’s why, when Adventure Time went away, I did not think much about it, even though it was undeniably weird: it just… went away. Just like that. One moment the Ice King was on screen, chattering away about princesses, and then he wasn’t, and in his place were just a bunch of colorful lines and nothing else.

I had never seen Cartoon Network do that, and I distinctly remember thinking “wait, we’ve paid cable this month, right?” then I decided that whether we had paid it or not, it was a funny thing to happen in the middle of an Adventure Time episode, and I turned to Gerard to express that thought.

Now, I feel that some background is probably needed here: Gerard Way was my roommate, at the time, he was my best friend and I had known him basically all my life.

I had met his younger brother, Mikey, in kindergarten: back then my father had just passed away, and my mom and I had just moved to NY. Our mothers made friends at a parent get together when they found out they were both from the same town: Belleville, New Jersey… and, well, I guess you know how this things tend to go: before I knew, I was going on play dates with Mikey Way and his older brother, Gerard.

I liked Mikey: even as a child he was lanky, and his knees where weird and he didn’t talk much, but he was nice, and he was obsessed with unicorns, and he always knew the coolest stuff, and then he grew up to be this nerdy, quiet guy who’d always smoke my ass at videogames and wouldn’t shut up about the latest issue of Batman or something.

Gerard was three years older than us, and he was nothing like his brother, and yet they were very similar at the same time: Gerard was less quiet, but more guarded, in a way, and he was wonderfully weird, and sarcastic, and he liked vampires, and he had the raddest music taste, and he always drank waaaay too much coffee, and he managed to be charming and awkward at the same time, and he could draw like no one else I had ever met.

He’d always say Mikey was the one with the brains between the two of them, and he was probably right, book smart wise, but Gerard had his own way of being brilliant: he was creative, and bold, and brave, and sometimes he was so bright it was physically difficult to look at him.

When I was a kid, I thought he was the coolest dude in the world: he had this way of being _proud_ of being a misfit that made him look like a hero, in my eyes.

Gerard Way, the guy who had the guts of wearing eyeliner in public high school... and I was just a half Italian midget who smoked too much and had a reading addiction: of course he was my hero.

Then I grew up. Graduated high school and started community college in Brooklyn, American Lit major. Then my mother died in a car crash, in June 2019, and I couldn’t pay the rent of our old flat, so Gerard offered me to become roommates. But that’s another story.

Like I said, I had known Gerard basically all my life, and I had never seen him as pale as when I turned to look at him that Sunday morning, when Cartoon Network went away. Gerard was always pale, but in that moment, he looked like someone had just smeared flour all over his face. He was so white he looked dead.

-Dude, you okay? – I remember asking.

He shook his head, slowly. He was staring blankly at the tv as if he were in trance.

-You know when the last time was that I saw the tv do that? – he mumbled after a few seconds. His voice was small, almost inaudible -Fucking 9/11, Frank. Fucking 9/11. –

I was something like flabbergasted (how the fuck is that even a real word) for a moment or two. I was a baby, back when 9/11 happened. Not even one year old. But Gerard was four, and his father had been inside one of the towers. He didn’t talk about it if it was avoidable, but if you knew him, you knew he remembered, and you knew he had issues about it. Hard not to have issues about it when your dad is dead because of it, I guess… and life hadn’t been easy for little Gerard after his dad had passed away: his mom had to work her ass off to keep their finances afloat, and he basically had to raise his brother, and he’d spent the rest of his childhood and the entirety of his life as a young adult struggling with the aftermath.

I paused for a second, unsure of what to say.

-I’m sure it’s nothing. We probably forgot to pay cable. – I muttered.

-Put on the news. – he said. His voice broke a bit over it.

I half heartedly switched to the CNN. I wasn’t quite expecting to see anything, not really. Another blank screen at best. I wasn’t taking it seriously yet.

But the CNN wasn’t blank.

The reception was bad, and the connection faltered every now and then, but the pixelated images on the screen were unmistakably showing the burning ruins of some big city. A really big one. By the sea.

-Is that… LA? – I asked. Now _my_ voice was breaking a bit.

Gerard didn’t answer.

The blood froze in my veins as I read the caption: _Russian aerial attacks on California – casualties estimated to be in the tens of thousands._

There was a news lady in the top corner of the screen, and she looked frantic as she jabbered something about war, but I wasn’t listening to her. I could barely even hear her, over the blood pounding in my head.

My first coherent thought was for Gerard. I turned toward him, and he looked at me, and we just looked at each other, for a while. His eyes were lucid, almost glass like, and there wasn’t a single drop of color on his face.

I wanted to say something, anything, but I couldn’t figure out how to open my mouth. Gerard didn’t say anything either. He just looked at me for a minute straight, then, without a word, he got up from his armchair, grabbed his jacket from the hook behind the door and fished out a cigarette pack from the pockets of mine, and left.

I didn’t follow him. I turned back to the tv, and put my cereal bowl down, on the floor. My hands were shaking. Los Angeles was burning. I couldn’t breathe.


	2. ..

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey guys, Matt here. I hope everyone's having a nice day (or night, if it is night) :)  
> … and that was actually all I had to say.  
> here's the second chapter, enjoy :)

Episode II

_ If life ain’t just a joke, then why are you laughing? _

__

Gerard came back hours later, and he came back the same way he had left: without a single fucking word.

We ended up not ordering take out, that night… mostly because I couldn’t get him to talk to me for shit and I couldn’t make him tell me what he wanted, so I ended up getting frustrated and letting it go. I made French toast, but he didn’t eat them.

I wasn’t _too_ worried, for the first two days or so: Gerard had been struggling with his mental health for most of his life, and he had a tendency of reacting big to big things, and that could very well be the start of WWIII (spoiler alert: _it was_ ), so I’m inclined to say it was big enough. Usually giving him space to work his feelings out was what worked best: if he needed to talk about it he would, so I just let him be, figuring he would have just snapped out of it if I gave him time and space enough to process what was going on. That first night, we pushed the beds together and made a blanket fort, like we’d do when we were kids, and then we watched Steven Universe on his laptop until 3 am, and I tried to talk to him a couple of times, but when he didn’t answer I didn’t push it. 

_ He just needs time _ , I told myself. _He’ll be okay_.

I only started to get seriously worried around the third day, when he still wasn’t talking and eating only the bare minimum to keep himself alive and moving. He went around like a ghost, going through the motions of life as if they were programmed in his head and he had no control over his body moving to complete them. It was like living with a robot, or something.

To be fair, Gerard wasn’t the only one in a sorry state. For a while, after the attacks in California, nobody knew shit about what was going down and people were terrified: nobody knew what had happened in Cali or why, nobody knew if we were going to be next, nobody knew if the world was ending and we were all gonna die in the immediate future… it sure didn’t look good: the news were few and often contradicted themselves, but the air was tense, and in a way, I guess one could go out and feel the bad things coming just by looking at the faces of the people riding the subway to go to work, or eating at the hot dogs boots or minding their own business on the side of the road.

With time, I guessed people got used to not knowing what was going on, and I guess people got used to be scared too, but everyone was a bit weird, in those first few days: everyone was terrified, and everyone was on edge. I guess we were all kinda expecting to see missiles in the sky any moment… and yet Gerard’s silence worried me. All of a sudden, I spent most of my days trying to remember if I had ever seen him take his meds since Sunday morning, and most of my evenings trying to get him to eat something, and most of my nights lying awake in my bed, listening to him tossing and turning until the exhaustion of the day knocked him out.

I was about to do something seriously drastic about it (like pestering him until he talked to me, or calling Mikey) when, on the fifth day, I woke up to the smell of pancakes. 

It was a Friday: neither of us had classes on Fridays, and my shift at the Mc Donald’s that was two blocks away from our building didn’t start until 2 pm, and Gerard mostly worked graveyard (or at home, when he had art commissions), so Fridays were usually slow days.

I had heard him getting up around 6, but I had assumed he was just going to the bathroom or something and I had gone back to sleep.

Now it was somewhen around 10, and he was in the kitchenette, flipping fucking pancakes.

He hated making pancakes: he could never wait for the bubbles on top to pop (I’m not even sure if he _knew_ he was supposed to wait for the bubbles on top to pop), and he’d always end up making a mess.

I stood on the doorway of the bedroom, staring at him like he had grown a second head. He was still in his pjs, his black air twisted up in a messy kind of bun, and he was making pancakes.

The sky was an angry sort of gray, out of the windows, and the naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling was on because otherwise the room wouldn’t have been lit enough.

Everything looked a bit yellow, under the artificial light. The stove looked like a battlefield, and the Strokes were playing faintly in the background, but due to the fact that I was basically deaf from my left ear, I couldn’t tell if the music was coming from his phone, abandoned in its usual spot on top of the fridge, or from somewhere else, filtering thought the paper thin walls of the old ass building we lived in. I moved my attention from him to his phone, trying to determine if it was making any sound, and that’s when I noticed the piece of notebook page stuck on the fridge with a piece of bright pink tape.

It wasn’t too big, and our fridge was basically covered in drawings and lyrics and quotes and, I don’t know, book pages. There was even half a page from the phonebook, somewhere, but that little one stack out because it was yellow, and I hadn’t even known Gerard had a notebook with yellow pages in his possession until that precise moment. 

It wasn’t a drawing, nor lyrics, nor anything that usually ended up on that fridge: there was only one phrase, written all over it, again and again and again, in blocky handwriting, almost carved in the paper with a red ballpoint that had started to give up somewhere toward the end.

_ FUCK THE WAR. _ It said. Thirty-seven times. I counted them, hours later, while he was at work.

I looked up, and he was looking at me.

\- ‘Morning, nerd. – he greeted, as if those hadn’t been the first two words he’d said to me in five fucking days.

And that was the end of Gerard’s reaction to the world going to hell: when two days later the president went on live tv to announce that the US were officially at war with Russia, he didn’t as much as flinch. 

Not that it was a surprise: it was pretty obvious that there was going to be a war, after Cali, and even if it hadn’t been, we had grown up joking that whether it was the Third World War or climate change, the world was gonna be rid of us well before we reached 30. We had kinda seen it coming for years, even if it had been mostly a joke. It wasn’t a surprise.

-Well, definitely not 30 yet. – he said, turning off the tv after the clip with the president in the Oval Office.

He was 23, turning 24 in April. I wasn’t going to be 21 until October: I couldn’t even drink without breaking the law, and now there was a war.

The day after the president made the official announcement, word got around that China had declared itself on the Russian side. Something about a secret alliance they had, or something. That wasn’t a surprise either: basically, everyone had suspected that the Chinese Government might have been in bed with Russia for years, at that point.

_ Commies get along _ was what the boomers would say, whenever the topic came up.

Most of Asia followed up on China’s example. And then the Middle East. Then Australia declared war to China and nobody on the face of Earth could figure out why.

-Australia doesn’t exist, and the Government is making shit up to keep the ruse going. – I joked one night, over dinner. It was Mc Donald’s leftover I had stolen from work and it tasted like death and despair, but we were hungry enough to not care. And it wasn’t like the veggie options I was stuck with as a vegetarian tasted much better when they were fresh. 

-You spend too much time on Tumblr. Conspiracy blogs are ruining you. – mocked Gerard, but at least he smiled, and I was content with myself for a second or two.

As for Europe… well, nobody was sure of whatever the fuck was going on in the old continent: word had it that the UK and Germany were at each other throat on whether to intervene or not, and that in Spain the Catalans had decided to seize the opportunity created by the general state of chaos the world was in and start a revolution, but nothing was confirmed.

Meanwhile, the world kept going, in a way or the other. 

Mikey came back from his university in Pennsylvania, saying that with the war coming, if the borders between the states got closed for whatever reason he’d very much rather be stuck in New York in his mom’s house than alone in Pennsylvania. 

To be honest, we didn’t even know he was coming until he was already back. On Sunday morning, exactly a week after the bombings and one day after the official start of the war, someone knocked on our door, and when I went to open, Mikey Way was there: as tall and lanky as ever, wearing an old Batman hoodie and a new pair of glasses.

-Hey Frankie. – he said, smiling from one ear to the other -I’m back. –

I was so shocked I had to close the door and open it again, to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating: the bastard hadn’t even come home for _Christmas_ because money was too tight for flights, and now there he was.

When Gerard saw him, I think he almost had an aneurism. I’ve rarely seen him as happy as he was seeing his little brother that Sunday morning.

He seemed to be better, after that, even if we could see New York slowly dying inside and that kind of things usually got to him. I mean, they kinda get to everyone, really.

People started going out less. Martial law kicked in, and suddenly there was a light out policy from 9pm to 6am, and a curfew from 8pm to 6am: everything closed at 8pm but factories and hospitals, and if you wanted to go out in those ten hours, you had to have documents that stated that you were going to work (and graveyard shifts offers were starting to get rarer), or that it was an emergency. If you didn’t, theoretically you could get arrested… but Gerard never bothered to get the papers, and he never got arrested. Not for being out after hours, at least.

We couldn’t figure out why the fuck we needed light outs and a curfew, honestly: maybe in the ‘40s bombers used lights to find cities to bomb, but we weren’t in the ‘40s anymore: it was the year of the Lord 2021, and satellites and shit existed.

I didn’t mind too much, though: at least the Mc Donald’s was now closed at night, and the sky knew that I hated to work nights in that shithole, and at least Gerard could stay home and fucking sleep, from time to time. 

At some point, we took up going out on the fire escape every night, around 2 am, before going to bed. Gerard always made me wear three thousands layers of clothes so I wouldn’t catch pneumonia, and then we’d get out, sit on the stairs and smoke the last cigarette of the day. Sometimes he’d bring one of his sketchbooks out with him and draw something. Sometimes we’d just talk and look at the stars: the light pollution was a lot less, with the new lights out policy, and the night sky was nice to look at. I remember how amazed I was at how many stars I could see.

It’s weird to think about it now, but you could say that things didn’t really go to shit until the drafting started in February. 

I mean, things went to shit immediately: soldiers were shipped to Russia and didn’t come back, the southern bit of the West Coast was basically reduced to a pile of smoking debris, groceries were starting to cost like hell, people were terrified… but at least, the only people who were getting sent to front were the ones who had signed up for it.

Then all of a sudden, at the end of the last week of January, about two weeks something after the end of the world had officially started, recruiting propaganda was everywhere: it was in every commercial break, in the pop ups on the internet, before every fucking You Tube video, in the papers… everywhere. Posters with Uncle Sam saying _I want you to join the US army_ were on every fucking wall. At first, it looked like that was all there was going to be. _Recruiting_. Nothing unexpected… but give it a couple of days and the news on CNN (and a day or so later, all the other channels) started talking about draft pools, and all Hell broke loose. Or at least, I expected all Hell to break loose. 

I _wanted_ all Hell to break loose.

Except it didn’t, because it was obvious it was gonna happen, and people had just been hopeful it wouldn’t because life sucked enough without having to live with the terror of being sent to get your ass frozen in a war that was apparently meaningless on the other side of the fucking ocean.

I expected riots, honestly, but nothing happened. People was just that resigned to die for nothing, apparently.

-Why is nobody doing anything? – I exploded, one night, while we were out on the fire escape. It was cold as fuck. The sky was so beautiful it was almost painful to look at it -The Government wants to send us all to die in the snow and nobody’s complaining! What the fuck did the Russians even attack us for? It’s been weeks since Cali, and I still haven’t heard a word to explain why the fuck LA had to become a pile of dust. –

-Probably something related to capitalism. – said Gerard, blowing out a small cloud of blueish smoke -Maybe they’re putting something in the water to keep people from rebelling against the drafts. –

-Maybe we should start a riot. – I proposed.

Gerard snorted.

-We’re not even fit for service, Frank. – 

-So what? Your brother is. Like, all our friends probably are… and we can’t be sure that we aren’t. It’s not fair that the fucking White House decides to start wars without consulting the people and then, when things get shitty, it magically is our problem too. I’ve never asked the Government to go pick fights with goddamn Russia. –

-This is why you always got beaten in high school. – Gerard scolded, but he sounded more fond than like he was actually telling me off.

Needless to say, we did not start that riot. And nobody else did either.

Before going to bed, I grabbed one of Gerard’s Sharpies (an orange one) and made a bee line across the room for the fridge.

On the bottom left corner of the yellow piece of paper where Gerard had written _FUCK THE WAR_ thirty-seven times, I added _When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die_.


	3. ...

**_ Episode III _ **

**_ And right now they’re building a coffin your size _ **

**__ **

I’m not sure if telling the story is doing me any good. I mean, it keeps me distracted, and the sky knows if I need a distraction right now, but sometimes it’s just _too much_.

Sometimes I get so caught up remembering that I forget that the war is kind of over and that they’re trying to have me believe it never even started at all (or… fuck, I am so confused…) and that I’m not a Brooklyn kid struggling to stay alive anymore. That they’re trying to convince me I never was. I forget that there are no missiles flying over my head and that I don’t have to worry about bills or what to eat for dinner or getting drafted or about winter coming. 

It’s weird. 

I forget that that’s not my life anymore, and that that kind of life sucked balls. I kind of miss it, which is fucking ridiculous. I miss Gerard and Mikey, which is way less ridiculous, pun intended. And I forget that I’m not there and that I am curled up on a cot with a gray blanket, staring into the void and waiting to starve to death instead.

Sometimes I feel like I’m losing myself, and I’m not sure if it’s a bad thing, but I am pretty damn sure it’s not a good one… but it’s not like I have anything else to do beside laying very still and try to pick up the water dripping somewhere below.

So, I believe I was talking about a riot I didn’t start, before I did start this useless digression.

The news talked about the drafts as if they were an opportunity, a chance the Government was giving to the citizens to prove that they cared and that they were ready to spend themselves for the Nation. It was bullshit, obviously: those who wanted to _spend themselves for the Nation_ had already enlisted… and I mean, we didn’t even know why the fuck there was a war to begin with, and there weren’t much people willing to die without knowing why.

The publicity started around the end of January, like I said, but the first draft notices didn’t come until February 15th, when the first letters were delivered. 

It was some kind of lottery system, like they had done during WW2, or in the ’60 for ‘Nam, except that we had no idea of how it actually worked because they weren’t doing it on TV or on the radio. It was supposed to be something about birthdays, and every third (or fourth, I can’t remember) name in an alphabetical list: on the 13th of every month, in every state a computer picked a few dates from the years in the range (from ’76 to 2003, for 2021) and then proceeded to print a draft notice for every third (or fourth) poor bastard from the lists of all of those who were born that day.

We’re talking something like 320k people drafted every month, for a grand total around 3 millions every year. Which was 1% of the whole American population, back then.

3 millions of people sent to die for nothing every year.

And every 15th of the months, 320 thousands of Americans found a honest to god letter with the crest of the US Army in their mailbox, and knew that the somewhere, in Siberia, a Russian soldier probably had a bullet with their name on it, and that they had to up and go because a computer had said so.

Theoretically, the thing was easy… a lot easier than any kind of draft pool that had been done before, during the 20th century, and supposedly everyone of age (namely, everyone between 18 and 45) had the same chance of getting drafted. The only weird thing was that they apparently weren’t using conscription, and that women were drafted just as much as men. And yet, it was clear from the start that the thing was rigged somehow: by the time spring ended and summer started crawling with its heat upon New York, there were hardly any homeless people on the streets anymore. Addicts were disappearing as well, and so were the immigrants, and the unemployed, and so on: all those people who were usually seen as a weight for society went _puff_ in a matter of months. In May, Gerard pointed out that a consistent number of the queer people we knew had been drafted already, and said that the gay bar in which he occasionally bartended looked emptier with every shift he took.

At the same time, at least for the first few months it looked like the war was sparing the youngest, and people who had a stable, 9 to 5 job, and people who had a family and kids… nothing ever got confirmed though: it was obvious that the pool was rigged, but it was just as obvious that it was one of those things that were probably under state secret or something and that were never going to be disclosed… and it’s not like knowing for sure would have changed anything: whether the lottery was honest or not, if you got the damn letter you went to war. There wasn’t even a penalty for desertion: if they caught you (and they would), they simply put you on a plane and shipped you to Russia, where you were supposed to be.

There was no escape, from the long, frozen fingers of the war.

The draft notices were always, without fail, delivered on the morning of the 15th, usually before 10 am, and everyone who received one was due to report to their neighborhood enlistment office for physical and psychological evaluation within the week. If deemed fit for service, the next step was basic training, or boot camp, or whatever you want to call it. And then, war.

Nobody even knew how many weeks basic training lasted, because from the moment you put dog tags on you were Government property, and communications with the civilian population were completely banned… which was weird. Nobody wrote home. Care packages could only be sent anonymously, to random soldiers. Once someone left for the basic, it was as if they had been canceled from reality. It was terrible. 

So, you can imagine how dreaded the 15th of the month was.

In our building people started gathering in the hall every time the 15th came, to wait for the mail guy and see the letters getting delivered… and I hated that it was almost a tradition. I hated that now we had habits that we only had because of the war, and that we were adapting to live around the war. It made me so mad it hurt.

Anyways, we had this big empty space on the ground floor, just inside from the front doors, and we used to gather there: everyone who was of age and didn’t have anything better to do. The front doors happened to be mirrored glass, so we could see the mail boxes nailed on the wall just outside: it almost looked as if whoever had built the fucking building had thought that one day a war might have happened and people might have wanted to see the mail boxes.

The mail guy usually stopped by around 9:30 am, so our unspoken rendezvous was around 9:15. 

Gerard and I were usually among the last ones down: at first because it was hard to get up knowing that it could be your last time getting up as a free man… and we were pretty sure neither of us would have been fit for service, if we even got the letter, but we couldn’t be sure, and it was hard anyways… and if getting up was hard, going to bed was even worse, so, after a couple of months, the 14th night of the month became a sleepless night. Sometimes we’d watch cartoons all night long, sometimes we’d watch Doctor Who all night long, sometimes we’d just hang out: we’d light candles, and I’d read, Gerard would draw, and we’d talk a bit every once in a while just to make sure we were both awake. And then, the day after, we’d have breakfast and try to find ways to procrastinate going down until the last second.

Then we’d go down, join the others in the hall and wait, in silence, until the mail guy showed up. Someone would try to hum a little, sometimes, but the silence was so heavy it always turned out to be creepier than anything, and I’d spend the whole time hoping that whoever it was that was humming or whistling or whatever would just shut the hell up.

I’m not even exaggerating when I say that those ten minutes waiting for the mail guy were the worst ten minute of the month, almost every month… because you realize how much you want to stay alive, when it starts to look like you won’t. You start thinking about all the little things you like, and about how you’ve probably done them for the last time and you didn’t even know, and about how one day you’ll see your favorite people for the last time, and you won’t realize until it’s too late, and that’s… it made me incredibly anxious. 

Gerard and I talked about this, at some point… not in so many words, but something like it. I did say the bit about seeing people for the last time without knowing it. After that, he always made a point of holding my hand, while we waited.

I don’t know why but it was always a shock when the mail guy finally showed up: I always squeezed Gerard’s hand a bit, or clenched my jaw, or something like that… because I always hoped there’d be no mail, and so no reason to stop by. I always managed to _convince_ myself that that was how it was going to go… but it was a big building, and there was always mail. The mail guy placed it in the boxes and then, if there were no envelopes from the army, before leaving he’d turn toward the glass door and give us the thumbs up. And that was it; we could go back to being humans for another month.

The first time he didn’t do it, it was May 15th and the hall was so hot it was difficult to breath: it was just past 9:30 am, but the sun beamed mercilessly outside, and the air was damp and made my clothes stick to my skin. I hated summers: my health was shit and I spent most of my winters sick, but I still liked it better than the having the sun scorching me, and shivering for a fever was not so bad, compared to being so hot that even getting up from bed to take a cold shower seems a chore.

Summer 2021 was a bitch, let me say it: the previous winter had been pretty mild, but spring had quickly escalated until we reached full on July temperatures in May, and that summer is still on the records as one of the hottest ones of the 21st century so far.

Anyways, like I was saying, the first time the mail guy didn’t give us the thumbs up it was May 15th, and I felt the ground disappearing from under my feet. I remember that Gerard squeezing my hand hard enough to hurt was the only thing that kept me from having a panic attack right there and then.

The mail guy just boxed the mail, then he turned without looking at the glass and walked to his scooter, and then he left, and that was it. 

The whole room stood in silence, just looking at each other, not knowing what to do, but I only saw this in my peripheral vision, because I couldn’t peal my eyes off the mailboxes nailed on the wall next to the door.

There was a letter from the Army, in one of those stupid boxes. There almost certainly was someone death, in one of those stupid boxes. One of the people in that same room was going to be swept away into a war nobody understood, and they were probably not coming back.

It was surreal. 

I don’t know exactly who, between Gerard and me, came first out of the haze. What I know is that the assembly of tenants had silently come to the conclusion that who hadn’t received any mail should go back upstairs and let the one who had have some privacy to find out their fate.

Before I realized, Gerard and I were back in our hole in the wall and we were done with it. We had another month to live free, but someone didn’t.

It was four whole days, before we found out who the poor bastard was and it was… well, let’s say that the circumstances were unfortunate. It was a Wednesday, early afternoon, and when I came back from my shift at the Mc Donald’s there were an ambulance and a patrol car parked in front of our building. My heart stopped for a second, when I saw them, and flashes of years before started chasing each other in my head. 

I’ve never really had faith, despite my parents being fervent catholic (or at least my mother was) and despite being in catholic school until 7th grade, but in that moment, I distinctly remember thinking _Please God let Gerard be okay_. 

And then _Has he been taking his meds lately?_

_ Has he been sleeping too much? Too little? Has he been eating? Were there signs that I missed? _

_ Please, please let him be ok. _

I made my way toward the cops guarding the front doors of the building, willing myself to look calm, and composed, and like I wasn’t terrified that that goddamn ambulance might have been there for my best friend. 

I introduced myself, forcing my mouth to bend into a smile as much as it could, I told them in which apartment I lived, commented on the weather (stunning, isn’t it?), and they looked at me weird, like they had decided that they didn’t like me, and couldn’t decide whether they believed me or not on the _I live here_ thing. Nothing out of the ordinary, considering I was interacting with cops. 

After a polite two minutes of chit chat, I finally managed to gather up the guts I needed to ask them what had happened. l 

_ Her name was Elle Cadieux _ , was what they told me: _looks like she killed herself_.

I remembered her: she was 27, and she lived in the apartment right above ours, and sometimes we’d be out on the fire escape at the same times. Most times she was on the phone, mostly speaking in French, but sometimes she’d notice Gerard and me and she’d say hi. We didn’t talk much, but I liked her when we did.

They had found her on her bathroom floor, propped up against the wall, sitting in a pool of her own blood, her wrists torn to shreds. In the sink, laid the draft notice, with a phrase scrawled on the back with a blue ballpoint: _Raise your glass high for tomorrow we die_.

Despite the relief of knowing Gerard was (probably) ok, keeping up the façade was hard: _I knew her_. One of the few good things about not having many friends was that I had yet to see anyone close to me get sent to war: all I had lost, at the time, was far acquaintances. 

And now Elle was dead.

I climbed the stairs automatically, then, once inside the flat, I fetched an old paperback and sat down with it in the living room/kitchen, but I couldn’t concentrate enough to read. Gerard wasn’t home, and I suddenly remembered that he was supposed to do some kind of inventories for a shop somewhere around central park, and he wasn’t coming home until at least 4 pm. 

So I stayed there, and I looked at my book and pretended to read even though I wasn’t reading and even though there was no one around to see me pretending to.

When Gerard came back, I looked up at him and just said _Elle’s dead._ His face went so white he looked dead too, for a second, but he didn’t say a word. He just turned on his heels and left again, and the memories from January of him not talking for days were still too fresh for me to not worry, but I didn’t try to stop him. There was no point.

I just waited, and waited. I made French toasts when my stomach started churning, and kept some for him in case he was hungry when he came back, and then I waited some more.

He came back at 11 pm, just when I was starting to actually worry and right before I convinced myself to text Mikey to see if he had heard from him. He had a sketchpad and a blue ballpoint pen I was sure he hadn’t had when he had left, but I said nothing about it, and he didn’t either: instead, he apologized for being gone for so long, asked me if I was okay and if I had eaten.

I said there were left over French toasts if he was hungry, but he said he wasn’t and asked me if I wanted to watch a movie.

We ended up watching Star Wars, but I don’t remember which one… I only remember that when we went out to smoke, around 2 am, he brought out his new sketchpad and the bottle of Jack Daniel’s Mikey and I had given him for his birthday.

We sat down like we always did, slipping our legs through the railings, dangling them into the void. 

The stars looked like fireflies trapped in the sky… and the sky was so beautiful my heart skipped a beat every single time I looked up.

While I took two cigarettes out of my packet and placed one I my mouth, he opened the sketchbook to a page close to the end of it (he had a tendency to use random pages, instead than going in order from the first to the last), and carefully ripped it out. 

It was a blue ballpoint drawing of a girl in a Victorian gown and a gas mask… and it was Elle Cadieux. I don’t know how I knew: her whole face was covered by the mask, but I just… kind of felt it, I guess. Kind of like I could tell that her long hair was blond even though the whole thing was blue… kind of like I could tell she didn’t have eyes, even though I couldn’t see her eyes because of the mask goggles. 

There was something unsettling about that drawing: it was… weird. I could feel it more than I could see it.

I looked away, moving my eyes from it to Gerard face. There were dark circles around his eyes, and he was pale, and he looked slightly frightened, but mostly just lost, and young… so young: he was three years and a half older than me, but in that moment he looked so much younger than 24 it broke my heart a little. Maybe even a little more than a little.

He looked up at me and he smiled faintly before asking for my lighter. I gave it to him, and watched as he used it to set the drawing on fire. 

The flames reflected on his pale skin. It made him look like some kind of angel: tormented and gorgeous… but I was not gonna admit I thought that. Not even to myself.

Instead, I chose to focus on the detail that I had no idea of what the fuck he was doing and that the fact that he was looking at something burning in his own hands _slightly_ concerned me.

Then, just before the fire could burn his hands too, he put his left arm through the railings and let the drawing go. 

I watched it burn and float downwards, dancing in the dark like a fiery butterfly. It was kind of hypnotizing. 

Then I heard the sound of a cap getting unscrewed somewhere to the right, and after that, Gerard taking a swig of whiskey. He wasn’t supposed to drink with his meds, obviously, but I didn’t have the energy to tell him off, and he it was 2 am, and he usually took his pills in the morning, and it was just a mouthful of whiskey and… I felt like a terrible friend, but I told myself that I wasn’t his baby sitter, and that he was old enough to make his choices. I felt like a horrible friend, but I accepted the bottle and took a generous gulp myself when he offered it.

When Mikey and I had got it, I hadn’t thought we would have ended up opening it for an unofficial funeral wake. I had thought maybe the end of the war. Maybe something happy.

I passed it back to Gerard, and he spilled some out of the railings, into the void.

-Raise your glass high, for tomorrow we die. – I muttered.


	4. .-

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I don't like chapter summaries.

Episode IV

_ Well after all we’ll lie another day _

__

It all changed, after Elle Cadieux killed herself on May 19th of 2021. Not for the world, obviously: mostly the world didn’t even know Elle Cadieux had ever existed, but it did change a lot for Gerard and me.

It wasn’t a big change, I guess… not one of those dramatic ones that make people think they don’t know you anymore, at least: it was all very subtle, and I sincerely doubt that anyone but us noticed. Or maybe, anyone but me. We never really talked about it, and Gerard never really gave sign of realizing it, but it was there, and I think he knew, just like I did.

The war became real, after Elle died. Not that it wasn’t real before, or that there haven’t been other _the war is real_ realizations moments afterward, but that was the first time we really saw it in front of us. The first time it really felt close. 

And we changed. For instance, I could never again pass in front of an Uncle Sam poster without internally cursing at the Government, after that. And I started flinching visibly every time I heard someone saying that dying for the Country was an honor and a privilege.

-Then get you fat ass up and go enlist. – I exploded at some point in June, in the face of a 30 something years old white guy in the Brooklyn subway station. That got me a black eye and a bruised rib, and a good fifteen minutes of Gerard giving me hell as soon as I got home.

-Shut up, loser. – I muttered flinching slightly when, mid rant on how I should stop antagonizing people a foot taller than me, he touched the swollen skin under my left eye. Obviously, he did not shut up, but I let him talk: I was kinda amused by the whole situation, to be honest… and it was kind of nice to have someone worrying for me, not gonna lie.

Gerard, by the way, started smiling a lot more, after Elle. Only, he basically stopped, too. He physically smiled constantly, but it almost never reached his eyes. He had smiled a lot less, before, but at least when he did, I knew it was real. Now it was just a smile.

He started drawing more, too. I mean, he had always drawn a lot, and he was a design student, so he was kind of supposed to draw a lot, but he started drawing a lot more after that: it was hard to see him without a sketchpad in hand, and I lived with the guy. He would have probably drawn even more if art supplies hadn’t been so damn expensive. He talked way less too, and never about things that really mattered. I mean, he did, in a way: he was working on this comic, he called it _Danger Days_. We’d spend hours talking about it, discussing plot, world building, characters, even though he wasn’t really drawing storyboards as much as concepts. 

It was the story of these four misfits who called themselves _the Killjoys_ and lived in the desert just out of a city called Battery City. Battery City was ruled by this organization, the Better Living Industry (also referred to as BLind or BLI). Their motto was _Always keep smiling_ and their logo was a (very creepy) smiley face. They had the people of Battery City basically under their complete control: all citizens worked for the BLind, ate BLind’s food, lived under BLind’s laws. 

The Killjoys were rebels. They dressed colorful against the white and gray of the BLind, and lived in the desert along with other renegades, mostly kids, and, guided by a radio speaker called Dr. Death Defying, they fought the Draculoids and the S.C.A.R.E.C.R.O.W.S., BLind’s police or army or whatever. 

They also had a religion of sorts. Something about a Phoenix Witch, who lead the souls of the dead back home, or something. There was a mailbox, in the middle of the desert, and the killjoys would put the masks of their fallen comrades or of the Dracs that were killed in battle inside of it, so that the Phoenix Witch could lead them home. Gerard never talked much about her. I had the feeling it was somehow private. He talked more about Destroya.

Part of Battery City’s population was composed by enslaved droids, and the droids believed that, hidden in the desert, a sleeping savior named Destroya was waiting for the right moment to rise and save them from the prison of Battery City electricity, without which they couldn't live.

It was all set after some kind of war. The _Analogical Wars_ , Gerard called them. The Killjoys had fought in those, I think, and one of their friends had died and left them a kid to take care of. The kid was only referred to as _The Girl_ , and for some reason the BLind wanted her. 

I liked talking about Danger Days. I liked the vibe of it: it always felt like bonfires and running from the cops under the summer rain, and like sunsets in the desert. Every fucking time I ended up looking at Gerard, surprised at how incredible his mind was... at how incredible _he_ was. And it was all a metaphor, obviously… that was how he talked about the important things: with the BLind as the Government and Battery City as the American People and everything else, but still. It was a whole other world, all inside his head.

It was so cool and so haunting that sometimes I found myself drawing BLind's smiley face on the margins of the books I was reading. Sometimes, I drew its eyes completely black. I still don’t know if they were just black or if the eye sockets were empty, just like they had been behind the gas mask in the Victorian girl drawing.

Sometimes I really was sorry that we couldn’t afford to have him draw more.

Money was a problem, obviously.

We were two college students in Brooklyn: money had always been a problem. In hindsight, that was probably for the best: the war was causing (or maybe it was caused by?) an economic breakdown and people were literally going crazy about it, but at least we were used to being broke. 

It was bad, there’s no point in denying it, especially because where it mattered, prices were spiking up: because of the whole _the Army sends your ass to war as soon as you sleep your first night on the streets_ thingie, rents were going up like crazy. I had always thought it took an asshole to be a landlord, but this? You can believe me when I say I was appalled: people were dying, and fucking landlords only saw a chance to make money.

Food started costing a lot too. With the state of the world politics, import was basically impossible, and with the Russian missiles reducing the West Coast to a smoking pile of debris and crawling towards the east with every fucking passing day, producing and moving the stocks through the country was a nightmare. That, and the fact that people started hoarding like bears before winter (obviously, because that was motherfucking America) lead to a single bottle of orange juice costing seventeen fucking dollars on August 22th of 2021. 

We learned not to worry about money. In a world where juice costs more than what you make in one hour of work (or two) if you start worrying about money, you’re bound to go insane. You just don’t stand a chance.

I worked in a Mc Donald’s, and my income was more or less stable. Gerard had a thousand little gig jobs that came and went by the season. The only stable one was drawing a pornographic comic strip for a Manhattan monthly magazine, and the guy who printed the thing kept threatening to fire him because he kept putting vampires in it, and apparently nobody liked vampire porn.

-People like Twilight, though. – he said one night, after ranting for half an hour about how much of an asshole the guy that printed the magazine was.

And I laughed, because to the mention of people who genuinely like Twilight, one could only laugh.

Anyways, the point is that with the jobs we had, we really didn’t make much. When paychecks came in, first thing was paying rent, then the bills, and then go get meds refills. When that was done, we usually put ten or twenty dollars each in the smoke jar, and, between the two of us, that usually left around a hundred or so dollars for food, and ok, we basically lived of off brand corn flakes (without milk, because to afford milk one had to be willing to sell some of one’s organs and because I couldn's have real milk anyways) bagged chips and stolen Mc’s leftover (and Oreos, sometimes when I felt like spoiling myself), but still, a hundred bucks wasn’t much to last a month. Food costed like crazy, fresh food especially. On a bad day, a couple apples could be around five bucks. That’s why you had to learn not to worry about money: you spent it while you had it, and then you’d come up with something or you’d starve to death. Easy. It was either that or going crazy anyways… and you got used to being hungry, after a while.

The water crisis was worse.

It started around September 2021, and I honestly thought that was gonna be it. _Blackest moment of the war, if you survived that you could survive anything_ : I thought it was _that_ kind of bad. I was wrong, obviously, but that’s a detail. 

I don’t know exactly how they found out: maybe they were doing routine research or maybe there were rules about checking tap water every once in a while, or something like that, but all of a sudden, it turned out the tap water was contaminated. And I am not talking just New York. I’m talking United States of America. In all of the fucking country there wasn’t one drop of water that wasn’t somehow poisonous. 

And people had been using it, for months probably, and people were going to keep using it because there wasn’t anything else… well, they came up with a way to purify it in a matter of a month, but it costed so much that to afford it you basically had to be ok with selling your firstborn on the deep web. So, rich people drank clean water, and poor people boiled tap and bottled water and hoped for the best.

The funny thing is that to this day nobody knows what the fuck it was that the water was contaminated with. The news always kept it vague: at first they said something about cancerous particles that came from industrial waste that hadn’t been properly disposed of, but then, a couple days later, they started talking about a Chinese bio attack, and after a week or so they stopped talking about it at all and suddenly we had a new war habit: boil everything you intend to drink and take showers as hot and as short as you can. Not that boiling changed anything (it almost certainly did not, in fact, change shit) but at least it gave us the illusion that we were in control. Somehow. Gerard started saying that at this point if it wasn’t the war that did us in, it was going to be cancer afterwards, and like I said we had always joked a lot about dying young, but at that point it wasn’t remotely funny anymore.

The war. We didn’t know shit about the war either, just like we didn’t know shit about the draft or about the water. I know I’ve repeated this enough times that it’s probably gotten boring by now, but bear with me because it might not seem, but I cannot stress enough how huge it was: we didn’t know shit about the war.

We lived in a world that had gotten us used to knowing everything about whatever in seconds just by opening Google on our phones, and we were used to being pestered by bad news every time we turned the tv on a news channel and it was just how the world went: the whole fucking world was continuously throwing against a live chronicle of whatever the fuck was going on, and it felt so normal we barely even noticed.

And all of a sudden, nothing. And it was WWIII, and it was gonna be the biggest event in our century, probably (hopefully) and the media coverage was… well. There was reanny no media coverage at all. 

We knew nothing. They weren’t telling us shit. It was fucking scary, honestly, because just how bad could things be?

The news were scarce, and contradictory, and the more time passed, the more everyone had the sensation of not knowing the faintest shit of what the hell was really going on.

Officially, everything was going well: moral on the front lines was high, the troops had supplies and ammo to last a decade, and the US Army was gathering victory after victory. But people died, and the numbers were disastrous. 

There was a radio frequency (and to this day, I still can’t wrap my head around why a radio frequency and not something more 21st century, like, I don’t know, a podcast or something) that transmitted music all day long. No commercials, no intermission, no radio speakers. Just music, any kind of music, from metal to kpop to Beethoven. 

Just music until 6:29 pm. 

Nobody knew why 6:29 and not, for example, 6:30, but every day without fail, at precisely 6:29 pm, the music abruptly stopped, sometimes even mid song, and a female voice politely greeted the listeners and started listing names and military ranks. Her voice was always very flat and detached, and she spoke very slowly, as if to give people time to process what she was saying.

It always felt like she went on for hours, saying names. 

The names of the fallen. Of the poor bastards who hadn’t made it alive to the end of the day.

And she always sounded the same. Like she was reading a very long and not very interesting grocery list.

People started speculating that maybe she was a robot, but I don’t think anyone really believed that: it’s just that when you force yourself to sit through what feels like a lifetime of names waiting for one you know, you’d accept any possible distraction and be grateful for it. So yeah, sure: the lady who read out the names was a robot. Why not?

She always closed her segment by thanking everyone who had given their life for the Country, and then the radio frequency went silent until midnight.

Every day, she read so many names it made me feel sick. And those were only the military casualties.

Truth was that people were dying in the States too. 

The bombings had continued, after Cali. Missiles kept coming, and coming, and by the end of January, Los Angeles was reduced to a pile of dust and radiations. Then it was San Francisco, then Portland, then Seattle. All destroyed before April had time to come to an end, and we still didn’t know why. Then they started to creep toward the east, chewing miles slowly but ruthlessly. 

Soon enough, people started swearing that they woke up at night to the frame of their beds shaking and started living with an eye always glued to the sky, waiting for the missiles to come. I think it was just mass hysteria, but still. It was unsettling.

On March 20somethingeth, the president made a statement saying that there was nothing to worry about, that the situation was being handled, and that everything was going to be okay.

-Bullshit. – Gerard said that night, changing channel from the CNN news to an old episode of Supernatural. It looked like season 7 -The Russians are fucking bombing us, how can it be okay? –

-Maybe they aren’t bombing us at all. – I offered, with my mouth still half full of corn flakes. We were having dinner. Dinner was cereals, that night. Dinner was cereals almost every night -Maybe on the West coast they think we are the one reduced to radioactive ruins. –

Radiations. That was something else nobody talked about. Another thing we didn’t know shit about.

-Yeah, - teased Gerard -And maybe in Russia they think we are the ones bombing them. –

-And maybe in Europe they think they are the ones at war with Russia, and maybe Australians think that America doesn’t exist. –

-Or maybe the world isn’t some sort of big 1984 like conspiracy. –

-Yeah, - I agreed -Or maybe it is. –

Gerard smiled and looked away, at the tv. 

Castiel was walking inside a lake. Maybe it was the end of season 6, not 7.

-Nerd. – he whispered, and reached out a hand to ruffle my hair.

-Loser. – I shot back, grinning -Stay away from my hair. -


	5. -

Episode V

_I mean this: I’m okay!_

All in all, 2021 went by fast as fuck. I’m not even kidding when I say I am pretty sure that it was the fastest year of my life.

I’ve read somewhere that it’s pretty common to perceive time as going faster when things keep happening without giving you the time to breathe: that’s why they call the 20th century _the short century_ … and well, 2021 was packed as hell, history wise.

The war started in January, and before I had had time to blink, the leaves on the trees in Central Park were turning orange and brown, and winter was rolling around again.

Gas prices were going up because the Middle East, where most of the oil came from, was on the Russian side of the war and had cut us off way back in January, but now the stocks were running low and with the cold approaching the usage was raising: it was simple Demand and Offer law, basic economy… if people need oil but there is little to no oil to give to people, a gallon of oil will start to cost more than a human soul. Easy.

In a way, it was almost nice: gas was so expensive that nobody could really afford a car anymore if not the shamefully rich. The air was clearer, sensibly less polluted, and for my terrible lungs it was a terribly good thing… and then the streets were less loud and messy, and kids could go out to play now, and it looked almost unreal, to be honest. New York felt like another planet, without the constant honking and swearing and without the smell of smoke, and without the gasoline rainbows in every puddle every single time it rained. It was nothing like the New York we had grown up in.

It was nice.

On the other hand, though, it looked like winter was going to be a bitch that year, and we couldn’t even remotely afford heat, and for my terrible lungs, that was a terribly bad thing.

First snow came on October 27th (which, for reference, was early as fuck) and four days later kids went trick-or-threating with two inches of snow on the streets. It was kind of absurd to see kids going for trick or threat, after all: there was a war going on, but kids were still kids, and kids just didn’t give much of a shit about the war. Sure, costumes looked cheaper, and the candy wasn’t much, but that didn’t seem to be much of a deterrent.

I turned 21, that Halloween. Gerard, Mickey and I went out drinking that night, and who cared about the curfew and the martial law: nightlife was everything but dead anyways.

The curfew had never been really enforced to begin with, partly because it was perfectly useless and partly because bribing cops was far from unheard of in New York, and with money being short as fuck for everyone it didn’t even take much. Maybe throw in a couple whiskeys and a beer on the house every day after the shift and the deal was sealed: you got to keep your bar open after hours and a cop got to get slightly drunk for free. Everyone won, and fuck the martial law.

So, we went out for drinks when I turned 21. It was kind of a big deal too: Gerard came out of his meds for a few days so he could get drunk with us without risking to poison himself (I didn’t exactly approve, but I appreciated the effort), and he made me wear my good shirt and a tie, and catholic school had left me with a deep hatred for ties but he was so excited that I tied it loosely around my neck and didn’t say a word about it. It was cold on the streets, that night, and there were kids everywhere because we went out early, before the curfew. We picked Mikey up at his place (he wasn’t living with their mum anymore, at this point) and he was wearing a cape and fake ass vampire fangs, and Gerard laughed when he saw him. I remember thinking that I didn’t remember the last time I had seen him laugh like that.

We went to a bar in the East Village. There wasn’t a lot of people and the volume of the music was fairly low, but it was a cool place: the only light came from fairy lights and ceramic carved pumpkins with real candles inside, and it was kind of dark and eerie but also warm and cozy. If I had to use only one adjective, I’d say it was kind of bittersweet, but with light. Yeah, I know it doesn’t make sense.

I… I don’t really remember much of that night. I remember the feeling of showing a real id to the bartender when I ordered my first legal beer, and I remember how that beer tasted in my mouth. I remember a slightly drunk Mikey engaging in an argument about The Doom Patrol with a complete stranger, and I remember Gerard trying to smother down his laughter while he watched his little brother get all red and flustered over comics once again. I remember singing something, but I cannot for the life of me remember what. And then I remember waking up the morning after on the couch in Mikey’s living room with one of the worst headaches in the history of headaches and Gerard’s arm slung over my back and his hair in my face… which I was kind of thankful for because the light from the window was killing me.

Sometimes I wish I could still get black out drunk. It wouldn’t solve shit but at least it would make me feel better for a couple hours.

If I had known that that was going to be my last time getting black out drunk for fun, I would have probably gotten even more hammered. Three days later, on November 4th, the first Russian missile hit Pennsylvania, in Pittsburg. It was still fairly far, and yet if felt like the Russians were breathing right on the back of our necks.

That’s something I never got used to: I could live with being hungry, and being cold, and over worked… I even kind of liked it. It was sort of a continuous rush of adrenaline. It made me feel alive. But being scared every time I heard a plane fly over New York, or every time I heard an explosion-like noise… that was something I could never make my peace with. I could stomach everything, but not living with the fear of a bomb dropping from the sky and turning me into a charred pile of blackened bones and radioactive ash.

If anything, at least it looked like the bombing were slowing down: the closer they crawled to the East Coast, the longer the missiles line of flight from Russia (or wherever they were setting off from) grew, therefore increasing the time of reaction that the aerial defense system had to strike them down. Washington had also approved a discreet sum of money to be spent on improving said aerial defense system, so it looked like things were only going to get better.

-Bullshit. – would say Gerard every time he heard someone (or the tv) talking about it -If the Government had a way to solve the problem, they would have solved it _before_ the Pacific Coast got canceled from existence, don’t you think? –

-I’m still not convinced the missiles are real. – I’d answer, to which Gerard usually rolled his eyes and muttered “nerd”. I’d smile and shoot back a “loser” said fondly under my breath, and that was usually the end of the conversation.

Then, suddenly, somewhere in that confused space that separates Christmas and New Year Eve, there wasn’t the need to have the conversation at all anymore.

The winter was cold, and I was half sick. Gerard had insisted on starting to share the same bed since we couldn’t afford heat most of the time, so we could keep warm at night and I could avoid catching pneumonia and dying. I had been perpetually half sick since the middle of November and it was only getting worse, because the sicker I got, the less I could work, and the less I could work, the less we could afford meds and heat, and the less we could afford that, the more I got sick. So, we slept together under a ton worth of old blankets. I kept telling Gerard that I didn’t need it, and that he was gonna end up catching something from me, but he was impossible to convince, and I had given up around the start of December. It was nice to cuddle every once in a while anyways.

The next missile landed just a few miles out of New York, in the middle of the night, and I startled awake to the walls shaking and the sound of an old paperback crashing on the floor. I knew right away, and I kind of shut down for a second. It’s not that I’ve seen my whole life pass in front of my eyes or anything, I just… it was like my brain had took a moment to process the fact that I was probably going to die and accept it, and then, once it that had been done, it had decided to come back and act as if it had never gone away.

I mechanically got out of bed and found my way out of the room in the dark, then I fetched a cigarette pack and my jacket and went out on the fire escape. Gerard hadn’t woken up, obviously: he was on sleep medications at the time, but even before of that, he had never been a light sleeper. I used to tease him when we were kids, saying he could have slept through a bombing. It felt a lot less funny now that I knew I was right.

I don’t know what time it was: the sky was the orangish gray it is at night when it snows (because it was snowing a bit) and there wasn’t a single light on in the entirety of New York. Not a single sound disturbing the silence. It was as if the whole city was holding its breath, waiting for the end to come.

I don’t know how long I stayed out there. I know that the cigarette had been gone for a while when I finally surrendered to the cold and went back to bed. Gerard was still in the same exact position he had been in when I had left. Even then, I couldn’t fall asleep until after dawn.

 _It’s real._ I kept thinking _It’s real_

It didn’t take long for it to get even more real.

I was at work, when it happened… and I was bored as fuck because the Mc’s was basically empty and all the customers had already been served, so there was literally nothing I could do besides playing Minecraft on my phone behind the counter.

It was one of the very first days of January, but I don’t remember exactly which one. Outside, the sun was burning in a sky that was as blue as it could be, and the snow was melting on the sidewalks, and the air was clear and cool.

It was almost a year since LA and since the war had started. I remember thinking about that at some point, just a few minutes before a fucking bomb fell out of the sky and dug a fucking hole in Queens.

Gerard and I lived pretty close to where Brooklyn ended and Queens started, and the Mc Donald’s I worked in was basically on the border, still in Brooklyn by a mere couple on blocks: the ground shook as is if it was going to crack and let the fire crawl up from hell and lick at the sky, and the noise… I remember staring at the glass panes that made the front of the fast food for a solid minute, waiting for them to explode, but they didn’t.

The few customers that were in ran out, either scared or curious.

I don’t remember running, which means I probably didn’t, given that at the time the last time I had ran had probably been in high school PE and running would have been a pretty memorable thing. All I know is that I found myself outside, pressed against the glass doors, and that it was utter chaos and noise and it was hard to understand anything. I turned my head to look around, but there were people everywhere, running and screaming and pushing and looking terrified.

I was terrified too.

My heart was beating so fast I thought it was going explode, and I couldn’t breathe: there was too much people, and too much noise, so much that it made me dizzy and that my left ear, the one that was almost deaf, was ringing. I felt like I was about to puke my guts right there on the sidewalk.

There was _so_ much noise…

Then I turned toward Queens, and saw the smoke raising in a grayish column, and I realized that if I concentrated, I could hear sirens in the background.

 _It’s not happening_ was the first thing I thought _It’s just a bad dream, Frank. This is not happening._

But the smoke kept raising, and it was now high enough that the wind was pushing it slightly toward the Bronx, and the people kept reversing in the streets, running toward the closest fallout shelters, or the subway tunnels. That’s what they had told us to do in case of bombing: _go down in the tunnels like they did in London during WW2, and let’s hope that they don’t collapse on your heads. May God be with you_.

 _This isn’t real_ I kept thinking, and I couldn’t move. I was so frozen that even thinking was hard. And wasn’t Gerard supposed to be out for a job that day? Didn’t he say something about covering a mural of a swastika? Where the fuck was it supposed to be?

I couldn’t remember where it was, where Gerard was supposed to be all day, and Jesus Christ if he was… I didn’t even want to think about it.

It was a solid ten minutes before I could move. The smoke was still there, but there was way less people running around now. The world was a little quieter now.

I turned and I went back inside. The Mc Donald’s was completely empty: even the people in the kitchen had left. Walking toward the counter was almost an out of body experience, like seeing myself from the outside and being unable to stop him. There were half eaten burgers left abandoned on the tables, a coke had been spilled on the counter, and now it was lazily dripping on the floor, there were hats and scarves and gloves scattered everywhere on the benches and on the tables, forgotten in the rush of running away.

On the floor, not too far away from the ladies restroom, laid a Happy Meal toy. I think it was a Pokémon, but don’t remember which one.

The power was gone, and therefore so were the lights and the radio: the silence was almost deafening. And I was half deaf. I should know.

It felt like a dream.

Then something started buzzing. It took me a few seconds to realize it was an actual buzzing and not just the ringing in my ears, and another half a minute to make out where the sound was coming from.

By the time I found my phone abandoned in an open drawer in the back of the counter, it had stopped vibrating. I just stared at it for a while: I didn’t remember putting it inside the drawer or putting it down at all.

I picked it up, and mechanically went through the notifications: I had eleven missed calls from Gerard, twenty three texts from Mikey (he hated phone calls with a passion), a call from their mom and six or seven other calls from various other people I was on various grades of acquaintance with.

I sighed and punched in Gerard’s number. I never used the contact list when I was nervous, if I could avoid it: stretching my memory to recall a phone number was a good (if a very brief one) distraction. Gerard’s was hardly a challenge, but I put it in manually anyways and then brought the phone to my only working ear, waiting (hoping) for him to pick up.

One ring. Two rings. And then…

-Frank? – was the first thing he said, and his voice was stained of worry and fear and tiredness and hope all at the same time.

Relief washed over me: he was alive, and he was ok enough to talk. I closed my eyes and let myself slide against the inner side of the counter until I was sitting on the floor, completely hidden from anyone coming in from the glass doors.

-Gee. – I answered, as soon as I felt like I could do it without my voice breaking over it. It broke anyway.

-Fucking Hell, Frank! The smoke looks close to where you work, and you weren’t answering, I thought… I thought you were… -

-I’m okay. – I stated, cutting him off. I was _so_ not okay -I’m… I left my phone inside the building and… I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry. –

-Fucking Hell. – he repeated. I wholeheartedly agreed.

-Are you okay? -I asked.

Gerard hesitated.

-I don’t think I’ll ever be okay again. – he said, in a tone that was almost cheery, and I could tell he was trying (and failing) to lift the mood. I also could tell he was _absolutely_ not o-fucking-kay -But I am all in one piece, yeah. –

I nodded, even though I knew he couldn’t see me.

He was okay. _He was okay._


	6. -.

** Episode VI **

**_ They burn ‘cause they are all afraid _ **

**__ **

As it goes, what came after a good four blocks of Queens were destroyed on January the 4th of 2022 was a long and painful week of dread and chaos.

January the 4th. I remembered the exact date just a second before I fell asleep the last time I slept, but it didn’t come back to me until just now.

Anyways, the aftermath was pretty much just what anyone could have expected: supermarkets got raided, curfew was suddenly more enforced than ever, and people looked so frightened I had to walk with my eyes glued to the ground every fucking time I went out, because seeing the fear in the eyes of everyone else broke my heart a bit.

It hadn’t been two days since the bomb had fell from the sky, when someone came up with the idea of restoring some of the old nuclear shelters that were scattered all around New York since the Cold War and started restocking them.

In less than a week, most of the people who could leave the city left for the countryside… and then food prices went up even more, and in little short than two weeks the ones who hadn’t run away yet started looking famished, because suddenly hoarding food in the basements just in case something went real bad seemed to have taken priority, and with the current prices no one could afford both eating and stashing away.

Tv channels started airing educational programs on how to survive nuclear fallout, and soon every commercial break started with a pretty girl in front of a blue screen, advising New Yorkers on what kinds of food were the best to be stocked on in case of lockdown, and reminding everyone to shower as often as possible to remove from the skin the poison left in the air by the bomb (and nevermind about the poison in the water, really).

As per usual, we didn’t know much about what had happened: the day after the hit, the mayor made a live transmission and said that the missile hadn’t been armed with nuclear charges, _thank God_ , but gasses had been involved and that the affected area was quarantined until further notice… at that point, though, we weren’t exactly sure of how much we trusted anything that came from the high places. _We_ being Gerard and I, but I liked to think the thing went for everyone else as well.

Truth was I wasn’t (and I am) not sure if people realized how fucking weird the situation was: like I’ve said before, I expected riots, and protests, and marches, and people demanding to know why the fuck their friends and relatives were being sent to die in the snow on the other side of the world, or even just to know the tiniest bit of what the fuck was going on, but nobody did nothing, and as the time passed the resigned atmosphere that lingered over New York became thicker and thicker, until it was almost smothering. You could tell people were scared, and that was understandable… but you could also tell that they had already gave up and that they weren’t going to fight it: they were going to do what they were told, and if a notice came they were all going to file on a plane and go die for their country without knowing why, and without a single word against it.

It was almost creepy how unresponsive people were. I mean, obviously everyone talked about the war and little else, and sure, there was the occasional hot head that got pissed over it, but nobody seemed to be particularly bothered by the fact that we knew nothing.

-Are we the only two assholes with a working brain left in the whole goddamn city? – I bursted one night, while the tv announced that there had been no new successful missile attacks in the last two days -Why does nobody seem bothered by the fact that we know absolute fuckshit about what’s happening? This is World War 3, for fucks sake: we’re probably all going to die and we still don’t know why.–

-Like I said before, maybe the whole thing with the Chinese spiking the water is just the Government drugging us into compliance. – replied Gerard, only half sarcastic -Or maybe we’re the crazy ones. –

-They managed to turn the United States into an army of trained monkeys. – I continued.

Gerard snorted. It was the saddest kind of half laugh I had ever heard.

-Quite literally. – he commented. 

When we went out to smoke, that night, he brought one of his sketchpads and drew a monkey. Or a chimpanzee, maybe. All I know is that it was wearing a helmet that was connected to a computer and that there was a tag on its chest that read _Pogo_. 

It was a week, before the posters started appearing: the city was looking for help to clean up the bombed area, since apparently the gas had dispersed enough for the air to be somewhat breathable and now it was supposed to be safe. The posters were everywhere: in every bar, in every public building, on every wall. You couldn’t turn your head without seeing one.

They offered 50 dollars per day to whoever showed up to help. 

I don’t know exactly what possessed me to make me think it could be a good idea, but the moment I saw one of those damn pieces of paper stuck to a wall, I knew I had to go. I don’t know how to explain it: I just… had to.

-No way, Frank. – blurted Gerard as soon as I told him that I was thinking about it ­-Your lungs are already as shitty as they can get without actually killing you, do you really think breathing chlorine gas would be a good idea? –

It was a Tuesday, I think. It was morning, and too fucking early, too: the sun was coming up and filtered in our living room in blades from the breaches in the kitchen curtains. We were sitting at our kitchen table, both tired as fuck and with a cemetery of empty Monster cans scattered all around us. Energy drinks were still weirdly cheap, but at the time I was convinced I didn’t want to know why. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know now either.

Anyways, Gerard had a commission of a portrait to finish and he had procrastinated it to the point that the deadline was the day after and he was only about half way through, so he had stayed up all night to try and finish it, and I stayed around as emotional support. 

I remember I kept asking myself what kind of asshole would commission a portrait in the goddamn 21st century and during a war, when the whole fucking world was going to hell and most people couldn’t even afford food… I don’t get rich people: just take a fucking picture like everyone else, Jesus Christ… but then again, that particular rich person was helping us paying rent, so whatever, I guess.

Anyways, as I was saying, Gerard wasn’t really enthusiast of my project to go help the clean up process, but it wasn’t exactly as if I was asking for permission… even worse, I am the kind of idiot that has the tendency to do things out of spite, so being told it wasn’t a good idea only convinced me further that I had to do it.

-Don’t you see it? – I argued -That’s the closer we’re gonna get to see what’s really going on, Gee. Plus, we could really use the money. –

-Fuck the money. – he replied -I’d rather have you alive and able to breathe than a piece of paper with president Grant’s ugly mug on it. - 

I don’t know why, but I didn’t add anything after that, and he didn’t either. The argument felt… spent, in a way.

Gerard didn’t talk to me for the whole day… and I felt really fucking bad, to be honest, even though I didn’t think I was wrong for wanting to go: it just… it wasn’t often, that Gerard and I fought. I had known him 18 years, at that point, and I could still count the times I had been _really_ pissed at him, and Gerard usually made it pretty clear when he was pissed at someone, in a passive aggressive way, so I was pretty sure he hadn’t been pissed at me much more than I had been pissed at him either. It felt wrong. And I knew he was just worried for me and that he was traying to protect me and all, but it still felt wrong to not talk, to be… Gerard and Frank and not _Gerard and Frank_.

The morning after I got up early, careful not to wake him, I drank all the caffeine I could find to compensate having had about four hours of sleep in two days, then I put on my warmest clothes and at about 6:30 I was on my way to Queens.

The sky was still dark, and it was cloudy, so the only light came from the lampposts along the road. There was something eerie, about the way the light painted New York that morning. It felt as if the whole universe was trying to tell me to go back to sleep because there was nothing in the world I wanted to see so early in the morning.

Sometimes I wish I had listened… I mean it wouldn’t have changed much, but it would have bought me a few more months of peace, maybe.

It was a cold morning, even for New York in January. It was so fucking cold I could feel the hair sting inside my lungs and see the frost beginning to form on my clothes every time I stopped a second to check a street name, or to catch my breath. I was trying to walk fast to keep warm, but my lungs were indeed a wasteland, and good old fatigue and I went on like a house on fire. Plus, I was tired, and it had snowed during the night so I was walking on like two inches of snow, and the ten or so minutes walk to Queens felt forever long.

They had built a fence, around the hole the bomb had left in Queens. One of those netted, opaque ones they usually put around construction sites.

There was an opening like a door with a couple of cops guarding it, and there was a small line of people waiting to go in: mostly men, mostly in their 30s, I think.

I started worrying a bit, while I waited: what if they didn’t let me in? of course they wouldn’t let me in, who was I kidding? I was short as fuck and I looked sick on my best days, and that wasn’t one of my best days: I hadn’t had a decent night of sleep in ages and I was running a cold, and after this stunt I was trying to pull, the best case scenario had me in bed with a fever around 105° for at the very least two or three days.

I surely did not look like the kind of guy that could do heavy lifting in the cold for a whole day without catching the death.

And what if they let me in and I felt sick? What if the asthma kicked in? I had my inhaler, sure, but it didn’t do miracles.

Maybe Gerard was right. Maybe I shouldn’t have been there.

I was about to turn and leave, maybe stop at the store to get something good for breakfast, part to make me feel better and part to justify being out so early in case Gerard asked (unlikely), when my turn came. 

The cops looked tired. One of them was a girl, and she looked a little bit like Gina from Brooklyn 99, only older, and more… broken.

-Name and documents. – she said, flatly, reaching out a hand.

I fumbled for my license.

-Frank Anthony Iero. – I muttered. 

The guy passed me a gas mask, thick work gloves and a shovel and told me that the goal for the day was to clear the bodies, and that I could collect my money and leave whenever I wanted to. I would have found someone to explain it better inside, if I needed anything to be explained. The marked buildings weren’t safe. 

The whole thing sounded rehearsed, as if he had repeated it a million times and was tired sick of saying it. In all fairness, that was probably exactly how it was, even though the gates had been open just an hour at that point.

And then off I were, almost shoved through the gate and into the war.

What I saw that day… well. I don’t really wanna talk about _that_ : what chlorine gas does to people is not really a pleasant discussion topic.

At first, it looked just like ruins. You know, like when you see war in movies, and there are all the half collapsed buildings, and the rubble on the streets, and the blackened walls, and all of that… except it’s not really like it is in movies. Somehow, knowing it’s real gives it a whole different vibe: it doesn’t just look terrible, it _feels_ tragic.

There were children, in there. And parents, and animals, and nothing was alive. Nothing had been alive in a week, and I guess the mask was more for the smell than for the gas. 

It was hard to look at: entire families wiped away in the time it took to blink your eyes… if they were lucky. Some of them had had to suffer through it, had managed to crawl their way out of the ruins and on the street before giving up, burnt from the inside. 

The first thing that caught my eyes was a scorched rag doll, abandoned in a sewer on the side of the road. It stopped my heart for a second.

There weren’t many people working, and you couldn’t hear a noise beside the shovels digging and the sound of the corpses dragged on the asphalt toward the pile. No one had the guts to say a word. Sometimes, the sound of someone crying or dry heaving would feel the air. Every time I had to close my eyes and count to ten.

There were sandwiches for lunch, for those who wanted them, but I couldn’t even think of eating without gagging, so I continued to work under the grayest sky I had ever seen and forced myself to go on until the dark rolled around. 

Then I got out, took my 50 dollars and spent around 20 of them on the cheapest bottle of gin I could find in the first store I found on the way home.

It was pitch dark, and I was completely fucking drunk when I finally got home. 

The moment I saw Gerard, I started crying so bad it felt like drowning, and I kept crying until I started vomiting… and yeah, it wasn’t a great night. Gerard held me all the way through it, until I basically fell asleep on him something like two hours later.

I woke up at 2 pm the day after to a wall of our room made into a giant graffiti of dark blue buildings eaten by black and red flames, with planes swarming like bees in the grayish sky.

Gerard was sitting on our only chair, in the dead center of the room, and he was staring at it. 

I didn’t ask: instead, I got up and went to get myself a cup of coffee. I wasn’t really in the mood to talk anyways.


	7. -..

**Episode VII**

**_And did you come to stare or wash away the blood?_ **

All of our cigarette money, that month, went into repainting that fucking wall: half the fucking building heavily suspected us of being queer already, I was part Italian and stupid enough to not hide it and Gerard was acquainted with drugs, and overall we kind of were not exactly model citizens. The last thing we needed was to find ourselves homeless: our asses would have been freezing on Russian soil before we even had the time to sleep one night on the streets, fit for duty or not.

So, the wall had to be repainted before anyone had the chance to see it and rat us out to the landlord.

Gerard didn’t offer any kind of explanation: he didn’t say why he had done it, nor did he tell me where he had found the colors (because he had acrylics colors, or something, but what was on that wall was a hell of a lot of material), he just bought white paint and covered the burning city in a thick layer of nothing that seemed to reflect his eyes. Or _in_ his eyes: I was never quite sure of which one was the original blank, if Gerard or the wall.

I watched him paint it white: he wouldn’t let me get any close to the paint tins, let alone help him… he kept saying I probably had inhaled enough poison the day before to last me a life time, and that he wasn’t letting me breathe any more of it any time soon, but he didn’t say anything when I sat on the bed and made it clear that I wasn’t going anywhere.

It was kind of cathartic, to watch the fire disappear under pristine white. It made me feel a lot less broken, for almost half a hour. Almost as if the white paint was in my head as much as it was on the wall. I caught myself wishing that fixing the world could be as simple as fixing the damn wall: just paint it white, and pretend nothing ever happened.

We spent most of January going out on the fire escape in the middle of the night just to talk and look at the stars, instead than to smoke. It became basically the only wake moment of the day (night) that we spent together: January was being an exceptionally cold stone bitch that year, with temperatures so low you could literally feel the frost forming on your skin as soon as you stepped outside, and it simply wasn’t livable without heat. We basically went the whole month eating only dry corn flakes and the occasional cup of instant ramen, working twelve to fourteen hours a day so we could afford to keep the heater on every other night.

I had to finally give up on school and drop out of community college to find a second job. It was a hard decision to make: Gerard didn’t call me a nerd for nothing, I _was_ kind of a nerd, and I liked my major a lot, but Gerard had had to drop out back in summer and I had been feeling bad about that for months, and I probably couldn’t have afforded another semester not even if I’d started selling my blood to vampires on the internet, so out I dropped.

I ended up stocking shelves in a supermarket not far from the Mc’s, and my health wasn’t the best, so I wasn’t in every day and I didn’t really make much, but it did help that they let me get away with small theft from time to time: when I couldn’t steal Mc Donald’s left overs I stole a couple tins of baked beans from the supermarket and vice versa. That’s probably the only reason why we didn’t starve to death that winter.

So, yeah. We barely even saw each other during the day, but going out on the fire escape at 2 am was unescapable, even if it was so cold you could distinctly feel your soul freeze ( _Jesus, Gerard, I’ll just put on another coat. I’ve got so many layers on me I can barely move, what’s another one?_ ­ _If I catch something I’ll let you punch me in the guts, I swear to God_.) and even without cigarettes.

We didn’t exactly go cold turkey: Gerard had managed to steal a Marlboro pack from a drug store, but twenty cigarettes don’t last long and we were trying to at least make it through the month without having to steal another one. Which meant we had one cigarette each, every other day.

-Your lungs are thanking me. – would say Gerard every time I complained about wanting to smoke… and I knew he was right, but I still wanted to smoke.

It was weird to be out there without the nicotine numbing my brain. The stars looked even more beautiful, in a way.

We usually just sat there and talked, for a while. Sometimes, during the coldest nights, we’d share the same step instead of me sitting a couple of steps higher, and we’d just stay there, arms brushing against each other, looking at the sky and talking about whatever. We mostly talked about Danger Days, but also music, and movies, and whatever we had seen on the internet in the last few days, when the internet wasn’t down.

We never talked about the fact that the internet had started to go away more and more often. I mean, not just the internet: sometimes the communications just… went down. Sometimes you took your phone out of your pocket to check the time and you’d notice that there was no service, and no internet, and if you turned on a tv, the screen would stay blank. For hours.

We didn’t talk about that. And we didn’t talk about the bombs, or the drafts, or the fact that people that were sent to Russia didn’t come back.

We didn’t talk about the war. Anything but the war. Fuck the war.

The last two weeks of January seemed to last forever, but like all things have an end, January had one too, and the world slowly rolled its way into WW3 second February.

As I said, people weren’t coming back. A year had passed since the drafts had started: over 3 millions had been sent to front without counting the regular US Army and the volunteers, and not a single one had made it back alive. Most of them hadn’t even made it back dead: no one came back from Russia… not even the wounded. Only corpses, and for the most part, the families weren’t allowed to see them. The few who were, wished they hadn’t been.

Nobody seemed to want to know _why_ people didn’t come back. After all, it had been a year and we still didn’t know why we were at war, so I don’t know why I was surprised.

And yet, life in New York continued. We didn’t know what our people in Russia were going through, we had no idea if Europe still existed and there was a fucking hole in the middle of Queens, and yet we kept moving… because as tragic as it was, there was nothing else we could do.

I bought Gerard a box of black Sharpies, when the first money of February came in. He smiled so big it made my heart hurt a little, and when night came and we went out to smoke, he used one of his new markers to draw the BLind smiley face on the wall of the building. He let me blacken out its eyes, and I made a joke about it being a demon, and life was good, for those five minutes.

Life was good for about two weeks actually. After spending the last half of January on the verge of starvation and risking to freeze solid every night, even just having something to eat every day would have made me feel like life was good.

Then February 15th and the thirteenth round of draft notices came, and Gerard and I came out of it with our mailbox empty, but Bert McCracken didn’t.

Bert was… well, I wouldn’t say he was Gerard’s boyfriend. He was more like this guy we’d known since high school who Gerard occasionally slept and/or got high with. I didn’t exactly like him, but it was more about the drugs thing than about him as a person: he wasn’t a bad guy, per se, but I felt like he had a bad influence on Gerard.

We still got along pretty decently… we did our best to keep it civil, at least: Gerard didn’t like it when we fought.

He hadn’t been around much, since the war had started, but Gerard still kept in touch, and I guess he was one of the first to know, because when he came back from work the night of the 15th his knuckles were a mess (which was weird: Gerard had never been a violent guy), and he didn’t so much as say hi before taking a worryingly increased dose of his sleep medication, going to bed and proceeding to not moving for the next eighteen hours.

He didn’t even patch up his hands: when he woke up in the afternoon the day after there was smeared blood all over the fucking bed sheets.

I was at work when he woke up, but by the time I came home I knew. Bert called me over lunch: apparently he had said something about being happy to be able to serve his country and Gerard had taken it less than well.

He said he’d rather have him pissed at him than sad, and asked me to keep an eye on him.

I remember being surprised of such thoughtfulness, but I didn’t tell him that. I said thanks instead, and on the way back home I stopped to pick up the cheapest pint of ice cream I could find. It was plain vanilla, and half melted by the time I got home, but Gerard seemed to appreciate it anyways.

He didn’t talk much for a couple of days, and he cried a bit the night after Bert left for basic training, but other than that he handled it surprisingly well.

Maybe being pissed instead than sad really did the trick, or maybe all the shit that had come down in the last year had numbed him out, I don’t know.

Bert left, days kept going by, people kept dying. Now we listened to the _Dead radio_ every time we were home by 6:29, and asked about it to everyone we knew every time we weren’t.

February was kind of a blur. Gerard made a comic like sketch of Bert face and stuck it to the fridge, and then life went back to being more or less normal except for our daily appointment with the radio.

Then March crawled in from the back door of reality, and spring started to happen despite us being too busy keeping ourselves alive to notice: the air slowly started to get warmer, snow started to melt on the sidewalks, and days started to feel unmistakably longer as the world kept turning on its unending journey around the sun.

It’s weird what spring does to people. It lifts them up, in a way. I didn’t see Gerard smile a real smile again until March the 3rd. Oddly enough, it was raining outside and it didn’t look like spring at all, but that’s a detail.

Another weird thing is how bad things sometimes seem to avoid you for a while only to come all at once when you are less expecting them: we had managed to keep on going without major incidents for about a year of war, with the French girl that lived above us as our only loss, and then 2022 started with Queens getting bombed and us half starving to death, February took one of Gerard’s best friends and by the time March the 5th got around I was in bed with a fever so high I could see the stars without going outside, and with a cough so bad it felt like I was going to spit out my lungs any moment… and that wasn’t even the worst thing March had coming.

It took me the better part of twelve days to get back on my feet, and somewhen around the fifth or sixth one I genuinely thought I was going to die. I don’t remember much of those days, but I have vague memories of Gerard shaking me awake at times to check if I was alive, and even vaguer flashes of laying mostly unconscious in the middle of the night, trying to listen to whatever he was mumbling in the background, trying to look alive every time I heard my name, or wondering why he was sobbing.

I think I heard Mikey’s voice too, somewhere in between, but as I said I was barely conscious enough to eat something from time to time, so I wouldn’t swear on it.

I don’t even know which one of us was more surprised when I started to get better. I think March the 16th or 17th was the first time the fever went down enough for me not to spend every waking moment in a delirious state. In the late afternoon, I was awake enough to hold a conversation for the first time in days, and one of the things I remember the best is how shocked I was when Gerard told me how long my fever had lasted: after all that time, the fact that my brain wasn’t deep fried to the point of blackening seemed little short of a miracle.

At that point, the process that was going to finally, completely and irreversibly fuck up our lives had already started… in a way, I guess you could say it had started a year before, with the war, but in any case, we had no idea yet, and we weren’t going to have it for another five days.

My convalescence went pretty quick after I woke up: time a couple of days and I was back on my feet, almost well enough to pretend I hadn’t been scared to die just a few days before. By the time March 22nd came around, all that was left of those terrifying and very painful days was a slight cough.

It had been my first day back to work and I felt great in comparison of how I had been just a couple of days before, I was pretty excited when I got back home after my McDonald’s shift: it usually took me a lot longer to feel that good after being sick, and really, I felt just great.

In fact, I felt so good it took me a while to realize that Gerard was acting weird. Even when he went out on the fire escape, I didn’t think much of it: maybe he was just a bit sad. He did that sometimes: go out and look at the world moving and sulk for a while.

I usually gave him space, those times, but that afternoon he didn’t look like he needed space: he looked… lonely, so I used bringing him a sketchpad and a couple pencils as an excuse to go outside and sit next to him. Our hole of a flat was high enough from the ground that we could see Brooklyn pretty decently. It was a rather nice view for a shitty apartment like that one.

Gerard accepted my offering and flicked the sketchpad open to a page half full of doodles. He wordlessly started to draw little black stars.

-It’s still pretty early. – I prompted -We could make a run to the store and get something decent to eat before curfew. I’m tired sick of dry cereals. –

I paused to reach into my pocket and try to count how much money I had left without actually pulling it out of my pocket.

-I’ve got seven bucks, or something like that. If you have another five dollars or so, we could get frozen pizza. –

Frozen food prices, as everything else, had skyrocketed, but it was still more affordable than getting real pizza.

Gerard spent another solid twenty seconds doodling black stars, then, just when I was starting to think he hadn’t heard me, he put his sketchpad and pencils down and folded his hands in his laps.

Only at that point I kind of noticed he deliberately wasn’t looking at me, still I made my best to ignore it.

-I’m completely out. – he muttered. And I could tell he wasn’t telling me something from the way he was dragging his words. They were barely understandable.

-Ok. – I said -Care to elaborate? –

I normally would have never questioned it, but I knew him, and like I said he was clearly hiding something, and I was starting to get worried.

-I gave my last twenty dollars to Mikey this morning. –

I almost physically sighed in relief.

-You should stop allowing your brother to vampirize you. – I tried to joke.

-He’s not… - Gerard trailed off, visibly upset -He got the letter. –

I felt my heart stop for a second. I shook my head a little. Maybe my right ear was going deaf too. Maybe I had misunderstood.

I opened my mouth to say something but I closed it again a couple seconds later. Mikey Way. My other best friend. The guy with the weird knees and the ugly glasses who always smoked my ass in videogames and ranted about comics to complete strangers every single time he got drunk. He _chose_ to believe in unicorns and liked to _accidentally_ let a nickel fall out of his pocket every once in a while so that people could find it and be happy for a minute or two, and now he was going to…

It couldn’t be true.

He was… he was my best friend, Jesus Christ. He was Gerard’s brother.

He couldn’t… it couldn’t be true.

-It’s the 22nd. – I managed to splutter in the end -He can’t have gotten a fucking letter now, Gee, the 15th was a week ago. –

-He didn’t get it today, Frank, he got it on the 15th and didn’t tell a fucking soul. I only found out this morning because his roommate walked in on him packing for boot camp and called me. –

-Jesus fucking Christ. – I whispered.

I was literally an inch away from crying.

-Yeah. – agreed Gerard -Jesus fucking Christ. –

And I don’t know what made me understand. I don’t know if it was his tone or the fact that he was still not looking at me, but I literally felt my eyes go wide as I realized.

I turned toward him and looked at him for a full ten seconds before saying anything. Hoping to find something, anything, that told me I was wrong.

But I wasn’t. I knew I wasn’t.

-Gerard Arthur Way. – I called, and my voice broke a lot more than I wanted it to -Look at me and tell me you didn’t fucking enlist. –

Gerard didn’t move. He didn’t say a word. He just kept staring at his hands in his laps.

-Jesus fucking Christ. – I repeated -Are you out of your goddamn mind? –

-I couldn’t let my little brother go to war alone. – he explained. I could hardly hear him over my own heartbeat roaring in my head.

-There’s no way you’re even fit for service, Gerard: no offence but you’re as mentally stable as a blind sloth riding a monocycle on a tightrope while the tightrope is on fire! –

-They don’t give a shit about mental health, Frank: you don’t need to be mentally stable to go shoot Russians. They even provide meds if you volunteer. And they let you choose your destination, if you want. –

I looked at him in shock. It was all so fucking absurd I honestly didn’t even know how I was feeling.

So I got up and ran away.


End file.
